Introduction to Choreographer
Li Jinyan, editor and director of the column group of "Remember Nostalgia"
Representative works: "Huili - Pearl of Southern Sichuan", "Chaozhou Taiping Street - The Brave Are Not Afraid of the World Peace" and so on.
"Invest in a passion, appreciate the rural style; broaden an eye, and look at the transformation of the countryside."
--Li Jinyan"
Sweet potatoes in the deep mountain pass
The first time our director team received the topic of Hakuba Village was at the end of October 2021, when we heard that one of the main industries in the village was honey, which is the village with the most bees and the highest honey production in the surrounding area. But when we arrived, we found that there were some villagers who were beekeeping, but the honey harvest season was in March and April of the following year, which meant that the shooting could not be completed before the year, and the village might be abandoned.
But when we look back at the overall environment of the village, we find that it is almost a two- or three-story country house. Why is this small village in a mountain pass so rich?
In addition to honey, it must have other rich industries. In the chat with the deputy secretary of the village, we learned that there are many villagers who grow medicinal herbs, oil tea and sweet potatoes, of which dried sweet potatoes are the main source of livelihood for villagers, and dried sweet potatoes in Baima have become local iconic agricultural products. So we decided to turn the bow of the boat and make sweet potatoes.
What particularly touched us was that during the survey, we walked in the village, no matter morning or evening, as long as we met the family who cooked, they would warmly greet us into the house and sit down to eat some sweet potato porridge they made, which felt like an old neighbor for many years, and there was more warmth in the kindness.
In fact, in the first two days of field research, the most headache for us was the theme, at that time, I found a lot of family trees, wanted to see their family style and family training, and planned to extract a theme from it, but two days down, only dug up the origin of the name of the village, and the rest was almost nothing.
Without a theme, the character story cannot determine the direction. Just when we were frantically looking for information, we met an old gentleman who loved to study the history of the village, who told us that the ancestors of the Baima villagers migrated from Wuyuan, Jiangxi, because the cultivated land was scarce, and the ancestors survived for hundreds of years by hunting and farming. It was not until sweet potatoes were introduced to Zhejiang that the original way of life of hunting for a living was changed.
Although they live a life of half ploughing and half hunting in the mountains, the people of Hakuba Village have never compromised with reality, and there is a side of their personality that does not accept defeat, so they finally determine the theme and do perseverance.
After setting the theme, the story has a direction.
Because Hakuba Village is located in the depths of the mountain pass, the closed traffic has been hindering the development of the village, and building a flat road to the outside world is the wish of generations of Hakuba people. So by the time the government promoted road construction in the 1960s, almost all men, women and children in Hakuba Village were on the battlefield.
When we listened to our interview guest, Elder Xie Honglin, talk about the road construction in those years, we were deeply touched, and in the winter of minus four or five degrees, the villagers were shirtless. Road construction requires underwater work, in order to resist the cold, everyone often drinks a little liquor and then goes into the water. In order to be able to dry the water on their bodies immediately when they came out of the water, everyone also raised a fire by the river. It is in this environment that people have spent 4 years to build a road to the outside world with their hands.
In the process of this shooting, in order to make the picture more abundant, our director team and camera teachers designed many beautiful shots, some of which were presented in the film, and some of which could not be displayed because of the problem of time.
Although there are some regrets, as the main creative team, when brainstorming together, it is actually the most painful time. Each person has a point, the program will have one more highlight, and you can also learn a lot of expressions in the language of the shot. It is precisely because of everyone's concerted efforts that there are many pleasing pictures, in order to give the audience in front of the TV more beautiful enjoyment!
Edit | Li Yuting